Category: Behavioral Advertising

We’ve got real privacy concerns on the part of the public,” Senator Hoeven said in a telephone interview. “People are very concerned about their personal privacy, especially as technology continues to advance,” he said, referring to revelations of spying by the National Security Agency. Fourteen states have already passed similar laws.

We knew this was where Facebook was going with this when they partnered with Datalogix. Oh, and don’t feel like you should give Facebook all the credit for this. This model was most likely inspired by ad agencies or big brands that knew this was possible. There are already top 100 sites doing this sort of stuff.

Facebook’s Vice President Of Ads Product Marketing Brian Boland tells me “This has never been done at this scale, to link digital exposure to in-store sales for anyone with a CRM system.” Previously, Facebook had been privately testing the measurement tool with a select few advertisers, but now it’s available to any advertiser that buys directly from Facebook’s managed sales team.

Apparently the company has been developing its “Music Audience Understanding” product for nearly two years. Lucchese said The Echo Nest is taking the machine learning technology that it uses in music and applying it to other areas. To simplify things, it’s not just able to say, “If you like Song X you’ll probably like Song Y,” but also, “If you like song X you’re likely to be Y kind of person, and therefore maybe interested in Z kind of product.”

My take on how things are trending is that ad sellers such as Pandora will pretty soon be providing user registration data and possibly analytics data to advertisers in all its glory:

When a user registers for a Pandora account, the provides his or her age, gender, and zip code. The Internet radio company plans to go through its data and develop demographics it believes advertisers will find more attractive than the imperfect browsing habits collected by cookies.

People were talking about this over ten years ago and then when they couldn’t make money with it, all the tech was modified to show us ads. There’s a good chance that history repeats itself.

I’d prefer not to remember to turn the air conditioning down, lock the front door of my house, feed a pet, pause the sprinklers after rain, type in today’s workout into the treadmill or order a milk delivery.

This is anticipatory computing. When technology anticipates our needs and acts accordingly, we will have achieved that zenith of laziness. We will be liberated from the tyranny of to dos.

We’re on the precipice of large scale anticipatory computing. Google Now predicts my destination and informs me of the traffic conditions using sensors in my phone and behavior recorded in software.

Microsoft’s cookie replacement would essentially be a device identifier, meaning consumers could give permission for its advertising use when opting in to a device’s regular user agreement or terms of service. Microsoft would then become directly responsible for users’ data and — assuming it doesn’t share it with third parties — confine privacy concerns to the Redmond, Wash.-based company rather than countless companies that currently collect data on people’s browsing behaviors.

Now that Twitter is almost a publicly traded company, it’s under pressure to find meaningful new sources of revenue. That may include advertising outside of users’ social streams, according to a new report from the Financial Times. Its sources claim that Twitter is developing an ad network for apps and websites that would target visitors based on what users tweet and who they follow. It wouldn’t resemble Facebook’s login-based advertising, however, as much of Twitter’s data is public. The network would reportedly launch soon after the firm completes its recent acquisition of MoPub, a mobile ad exchange.

He is not worried that the general public will see the service as spying on consumers. English explained, “Consumers opt in when they download the Swirl app or the store’s mobile app. And their phone is reacting to a beacon in the store rather than being tracked. They are happy to opt in because it gives them an opportunity to get discounts.”